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How Egypt’s regime ended

Eugene Rogan

Alaa Al Aswany ON THE STATE OF EGYPT A novelist’s provocative reflections Translated by Jonathan Wright 202pp. American University in Cairo Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £19.95. 978 977 416 461 3

A
utocracy has been one of the abiding themes of the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al
Aswany’s bestselling books, which tend to culminate in confrontations
between ordinary Egyptians and latter-day pharaohs. There was the Big Man in
The Yacoubian Building who demanded a 25 per cent cut on the income of any
big businessman who wanted to run for the Egyptian parliament. When one
aspiring candidate dared to complain, the Big Man, speaking from behind a
screen like the Wizard of Oz, explained the system with a scarcely veiled
threat: “We protect you from the tax office, the insurance office, the
safety standards office, the audit office and a thousand other offices that
could bring your project to a halt and destroy you in a flash”. “The
president” put in an appearance in the climax of Aswany’s second novel,
Chicago. Bearing the smile he had decided twenty-five years earlier looked
photogenic, with his jet-black dyed hair and face “covered with layers of
fine makeup so he would appear younger in photographs”, the
seventy-five-year-old president was described with such precision that
Aswany did not have to mention Hosni Mubarak by name.

Western readers familiar with Egypt’s autocratic rulers were stunned by the
audacity of Aswany’s novels, in describing the abuse of power that traversed
the Egyptian political system with such critical candour. His Egyptian
readers, however, knew Aswany’s views from his weekly columns in the
independent Cairo daily newspapers, al-Dustur and al-Shorouk. While it would
be wrong to credit Aswany with predicting the Egyptian revolution that
overthrew Mubarak in February 2011, his essays capture the issues and
outrage that drove millions of Egyptians to demand the overthrow of the
regime.

While volumes of his essays are in print in Arabic, On the State of Egypt
provides Western readers with a small sampling of Aswany’s provocative
writings in an excellent English translation by Jonathan Wright. Drawing on
essays published between February 2005 and October 2010, the book addresses
the social and political ills Egypt faced at the start of the twenty-first
century.

The essays are grouped into three sections: The Presidency and Succession; The
People and Social Justice; and Free Speech and State Repression. Aswany
deploys all his talents as a creative writer, inventing fictive dialogues
and novel scenarios to get his point across. He rages against hypocrisy and
defends the rights of women and minorities in Egypt. He is particularly
sharp in recovering Islam from the hands of Islamist extremists. With his
trademark signature line at the end of each of his columns, “Democracy is
the solution”, he effectively trumps the Muslim Brothers, with their slogan
“Islam is the solution”, reminding Western readers of the importance of
secular, or at least non-Islamist, political activists in the Arab world. It
was, after all, liberal reformers who spearheaded the revolutions in Tunisia
and Egypt in 2011.

The ironic and detached tone of Aswany’s writings does nothing to diminish the
sense of outrage that lay behind his political observations. He was
relentless in his opposition to the making of a Mubarak dynasty and the
presumed plans for Gamal Mubarak to succeed his father to the presidency. He
threw his full weight behind the Egyptian Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei’s
bid to challenge Mubarak for the presidency. He was categorical in
condemning the routine practice of arrest and torture of civilians for their
political views. He called on his fellow Egyptians to resist the culture of
subservience to power, and to demand their legitimate political and human
rights.

As for many in Egypt, the murder in June 2010 of the young blogger Khaled Said
in Alexandria, beaten to death by plainclothes policemen, represented a
turning point for Aswany. “The murder of Khaled Said in this brutal manner
and the fact that the killers have escaped punishment plainly indicate that
any police officer . . . can kill whomever he wants and the apparatus of
despotism will step in at once to exonerate the killer”. He concluded the
column, published in June 2010, in terms that should have warned all Western
policy analysts that change was coming to Egypt. “The wave of protests
sweeping Egypt from one end to the other today is essentially due to the
fact that life for millions of poor people, which was already hard, has
become impossible. The more important reason for these vehement protests is
that Egyptians have realized that silence about justice will not protect
them from injustice.” It was, of course, the Facebook group called “We Are
All Khaled Said” that was the prime vehicle for organizing the
demonstrations of the January 25 Movement that brought Mubarak down.

Recent polls in Egypt, taken since Mubarak’s overthrow, have highlighted the
greater importance average Egyptians placed on economic grievances over
political issues or human rights, in seeking the fall of the Mubarak regime.
As Samer Soliman conclusively demonstrates in The Autumn of Dictatorship,
his recent study of the political economy of Mubarak’s Egypt, the people
were entirely right to be concerned about the parlous state of Egypt’s
economy.

Originally published in Arabic in 2006 under a title which translates as
“Strong Regime, Weak State”, Soliman’s book has been updated for this
translated edition to reflect on the revolutionary movement of 2011 (though
clearly his publishers rushed the translation into print before Mubarak
actually fell on February 11). Drawing on Western social science and
financial data gleaned from the balance sheet of the Egyptian general
budget, Soliman provides a rigorous analysis of the chronic fiscal crisis
that has plagued Egypt since the mid-1980s.

While the academic tone of his book might put off general readers, Soliman’s
thesis is simple and persuasive. Since the mid-1980s, Egypt has been living
beyond its means. Reliant on rents from Suez Canal revenues, the state’s
limited oil resources and foreign aid, Egypt has in recent years experienced
a decline in these sources of revenue, resulting in a prolonged fiscal
crisis that has left the country with large budget deficits and chronic
indebtedness. The Mubarak regime responded to the rapid and steep decline in
state revenues by increasingly authoritarian means. The less the Egyptian
state was able to meet the economic aspirations of the Egyptian people, the
more repressive it became of their political and human rights.
Paradoxically, the weaker the fiscal crisis left the Egyptian state, the
stronger it made the Mubarak regime.

Soliman begins by looking at the growth of the institutions of the Egyptian
state under Mubarak. Faced with diminishing revenues, the Mubarak regime
responded by privileging those government departments that reinforced its
hold over society – the Ministries of Interior, Culture, Religious
Endowments and Education. While cutting the defence budget, Mubarak allowed
the military to “invest in certain civilian commercial sectors, which had
earned the army considerable financial independence from the national
budget”. By giving the Egyptian military its autonomy, Mubarak no doubt laid
the foundations for the army’s ultimate betrayal of the President when they
refused to defend him against the demands of popular protesters in January
2011. Within government ministries, growing inequality between increasingly
well-paid technical bureau staffers and ordinary ministry employees resulted
in growing resentments between a thin layer of regime cronies and the vast
majority of Egyptians.

The measures taken by the Mubarak regime to try to address the fiscal crisis
transformed the government of Egypt into what Soliman terms a “predatory
state” that seeks to maximize income by all means rather than to maximize
provision to citizens. Provoking inflation by printing more money was a way
to tax the poor and those on fixed incomes. Government borrowing increased
national debt. When these short-term measures failed to resolve the fiscal
crisis, the government was forced to introduce tax hikes – provoking
predictable opposition from the general public, many of whom were living at
or below subsistence.

Rather than provide for Egypt’s working classes, the regime increasingly
struck a bargain with the country’s businessmen, giving more power to
Egypt’s capitalists while gaining a new source of finance (as Aswany
captured in his dialogue between the businessman and the Big Man in The
Yacoubian Building). These were the people who stood to gain most by Gamal
Mubarak’s alleged plans to succeed his father to the presidency – and who
generated most resentment among educated Egyptians. “The growing political
influence of businessmen sparked resentment among the intelligentsia and
some segments of the middle class who were feeling increasingly
marginalized”, Soliman concluded. These are the people who led the
anti-regime movements of the first decade of the twenty-first century,
culminating in the revolution of 2011.

Both Alaa al Aswany’s essays and Samer Soliman’s study reveal how much Western
readers stand to gain from Arab scholarship. As the events of 2011
demonstrate the continued thirst for knowledge on a rapidly changing Arab
world, it is to be hoped that more English and American publishers will
commission important works of non-fiction from across the Arab world.

Eugene Rogan teaches the modern history of the Middle East at the
University of Oxford and is the author of The Arabs: A history, 2009.